“For Gods sake, woman!” King Janius bellowed as he threw the door open, storming into the underground room. “I thought you were a healer!”
The old woman sighed, not even masking her irritation at being disrupted, even if it was royalty slamming her door against the wall. She set her pen down carefully, turning in her chair with the slowness of age to acknowledge him.
“I am a healer, not a miracle worker. Not much I can do when you go against my orders and make that ulcer flare ugly.”
“How dare you speak to me like that, I am your king!” He bellowed, the apples of his cheeks growing cherry red in anger.
“And foremost my patient,” she snapped back, matching his glare and temper.
“I could have you thrown into prison for speaking to me like this,” he growled, grimacing as he clutched his stomach.
“Ah yes, perhaps your torturers could put my spine back into place for me on the wrack. I’d thank them for chopping off these arthritic fingers at this point, kiss my executioner for putting me out of my misery—”
His loud moan of annoyance cut off her lamenting as he rolled his eyes, dropping his pudgy frame into the only other unoccupied chair in the room. “Peace you old bat, I might lose my hearing from your wails if you continue. I already have a wife harping on me for whatever new crisis she can conjure up, I don’t need another woman on my other ear.”
“Then stick to the diet I’ve set you to and you won’t,” she replied sourly, working her way off the stool and shuffling to shelves that had been lowered so she might reach them. Cork-sealed glasses filled with dried herbs and powders lined every inch of them, and she plucked up a few of the unmarked containers and gathered them to her breast, using the other to steady herself against the stone island as she moved for the mortar and pestle.
“I have! You’ve got that cook trained to heel; my meals are as bland and miserable as you had hoped and yet still I suffer. If your methods keep failing, I’ll find a new occupant for this room, perhaps a bonny mid-witch with better curves and manners.”
She snorted, both knowing his threats were superficial. The old woman was a permanent fixture in the castle. It was rumored her house had once occupied the hill Janius’ had commissioned this castle be built upon, and when the underground rooms had been completed even before the rest of the castle walls went up, she had moved in.
At the beginning she had only aided servants for more embarrassing disorders; an itchy crotch, an unwanted pregnancy, an unsightly wart. But as her reputation grew so had her clientele, treating everything from cuts and broken bones to internal ailments the Physickers in the Royal Medica were unable to.
She was notoriously indiscriminate, the nobles treated with the same level of respect as the servants. Which meant the same level of disrespect. There was not one polite bone left in the old creature, if ever she had one to begin with. But she was effective, and despite her grouchiness was discreet.
The Physickers had prescribed Janius medicines for the burning in his belly, but they had given nothing but temporary relief. Despite her crankiness it had been her medicine, her recommendations to add and remove certain foods from his cuisine that had helped the most. Lately though, even that was not enough.
He belched loudly, groaning again as he leaned back in the chair and closed his eyes, attempting to focus on the rhythmic grinding of her pestle circling the inner walls of the granite mortar. The fragrant sweetness of the herbs being ground to such a fine dust, it floated in the air and teased his tongue and nose with their flavor. Licorice, fennel, mint and basil.
The pestle stopped and her wispy, labored breaths filled the silence as she retrieved the kettle always kept ready on a small stove built into the wall. She poured him a cup, adding the powdered herbs to it and working her way back to him.
“Here, Your Majesty,” she quipped, extending the ceramic cup to him when he opened his eyes. Accepting the mug he inhaled the steam, taking a careful sip as she watched on shrewdly.
“It’s gotten worse then, has it?”
Mouth full he nodded in response, savoring the way the concoction calmed his stomach, even though the relief would not last. “Is there no more you can do?”
“I am no Warlock, sire,” she replied bitterly, and Janius scowled. He understood what she meant by that, and resented it entirely.
Physickers were educated in medicine, some with a gift for healing though it could’t be called magic. No, the true wielders of bodily miracles had been the Warlocks who had specialized in blood magic. They had been travelers, visiting the villages and towns that had sprouted up on the old byways that were now used without fear of demon attacks. Treating the ill, the injured, and asking nothing in return save for a place to rest and the life of any child born a warlock they found in their wanderings.
And all of them had been wiped out at his command.
General Isenius had vowed to replace such a painful loss to their society, devoting himself into establishing a University for their budding city. The Medica branch was already training the next generation of Physickers, though classes were being held in tent camps since almost all masons and skilled crafters had been conscripted to the castle grounds.
But comparing the talent of a Blood Warlock to a Physicker was like comparing a crippled donkey to a thoroughbred. The loss was devastating, and Janius was coming to realize this.
She leaned back against her stone island, humming a grunt. “I heard the last executions hadn’t even included any true warlock.”
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Her voice turned somber, lowering. “A little girl with sky blue eyes and cornsilk braids who screamed for her mother, even while the pyre burned.”
Just that easily the tension her tea had alleviated returned ten-fold. He blinked as if struck, grip turning white-knuckled around the mug as baby blue eyes slid warningly towards her.
“Enough, Ath,” he ground out wearily, lips thinning. “You go too far.”
When she had first arrived, it was with the intent to kill this same man whose stomach ulcers she was now treating. It had become clear early on though that while Janius was King, he was not entirely in control.
Somewhere along the way, Isenius had begun to undermine his authority. Magnanimously, he had taken more responsibility for his sovereign after he had returned a hero from beyond the wall, choosing projects that endeared him to the people, gained exposure to the masses. It had been Isenius whose voice carried over the screams of a child to stoke the flames of hatred and fear higher today, just as it had been over the last few weeks.
The warlocks were entirely at fault that the cambions had broken loose. It had been the warlocks fault that so many of their husbands, brothers, sons, had been slaughtered. Their bodies left to feed those beings more animal than man.
No more, the people screamed. Kill them all!
So they had, until all that could be found, had been found. Those that survived were so deep in hiding even she could not find them to offer the same protection she had received in that vault beneath the city’s cemetery. The truth of it was, she knew Janius could not bear witnessing a girl he knew to be innocent sacrificed to feed the perverse retribution of the city. Or any of the others that had preceded her.
And now, she found herself in an uneasy alliance with the same king who had played a part in the genocide of her kind. Because the real threat was the Commander who had come home with hair as white as snow and hunger in his eyes. That cunningly hidden hatred was what she had expected to find in Janius, but the man, while short-tempered and impatient, was actually a natural leader who was not as stubbornly set in his ways as he appeared.
In his youth he had brought the broken remnants of the human race together through careful negotiations, and when those failed, through war. Manipulative, yes, as all charismatic individuals were, but she had found he was not as corrupt as she had initially assumed.
He was a good leader, a good king, but with Isenius circling the throne and growing ever closer, he would not be in power for much longer. Already rumors were being whispered among the destitute, gathering power as it slipped from lips to ears; Janius was a Warlock, as were his children.
It was not his diet causing the ulcers, but anxiety and fear.
Tamping down her nerves, she tilted her head in the direction of the tome opened on the writing pedestal. “Do you know what that is?”
“Should I care?” He replied gruffly, despite the way his attention inadvertently drifted to the book. It had been a project the old woman had been working on for weeks now, the nobles complaining noisily about the fact unless it was a critical illness or injury she had snapped at them to ‘go elsewhere for coddling,’ without so much as looking up from its pages she was filling obsessively.
Unable to hide his curiosity any longer the king rose, flipping back a few pages to scan the paragraphs written in perfect, concise lines across the vellum. His brows dipped, nose inching closer to the ink before snapping back to glare at her.
“The hell is this? ‘Naon had selflessly laid down his life to close the portal, a testament to his loyalty to the people of the new nation established by King Janius’? These are lies!”
“Tell me sire,” she replied back calmly, those dark eyes settling fully upon him. He froze, alarm trickling down his spine, raising the fine hairs on his arms under that sharp gaze that did not belong in the face of such an old woman. Her smile was an acknowledgement of his sudden sobriety that she was not what she appeared to be. “How long have I truly been here?”
“No more than a handful of years, according to my spies,” he answered gruffly, expecting to throw her off guard with this knowledge. Instead those luminous eyes gleamed with amusement, flecks of cobalt catching in the dim candlelight before vanishing, as if it had been only his imagination. She canted her head, conceding the truth to his accusation.
“Yet your servants, guards and nobles know that to be a lie. Your palace was built on the bones of my house, and so rightfully, I belong here.” Her eyebrows rose, a smirk stretching the wrinkles pruning her lips and gathering the ones at their corners. “More so, I’d say, than even you do.”
“Though we both know that to be untrue, they have accepted this as the absolute truth of me. The lie fed so subtly, so casually, that every one of them have a family member or friend who remembers my quaint little cottage to some degree. The notion that a wise, helpful old hedgewitch had infiltrated your walls and commandeered a room in the basement would be preposterous to them. For though I am prickly, I am a nostalgic part of the history of this place now. Wouldn’t you agree?”
He didn’t respond, eyes distant as he grasped her meaning. The clever mind that had gathered up the remains of his people and set the foundation for an empire was working again, no longer caught in the trap of fear.
“He has the attention of the masses,” Janius began, fingers drumming on the page of her book.
“His power over them is based on the perceived threat that the warlocks are still out there, still a threat. All it would take is a change in the narrative by popular means. Your people flock to religion for a hope of peace after centuries of fear and loss. To the taverns for reprieve from the days spent rebuilding what we once were.”
“And what narrative would you have me feed them?”
“That Naon was the last Warlock. It would undermine Isenius’s campaign completely, and since you have never attended the executions, would leave him to take the fall for these shameful trials where innocents have been murdered, all in an attempt to steal the throne.”
At first he contemplated it dubiously, then he nodded in understanding. Buy the church off, pay the bards to sing this new historic recount, and leave the rest to those who would spread this as the truth. He looked down at the book, glancing over the text that mixed truth with lies, until it was nothing but lies that became truth.
“Of course this whole idea will fall apart the minute another Warlock is born, though,” he surmised finally. “It’s a good idea, but not good enough.”
Ath’s smile widened, and the King paused, looking back to her. “You have a solution?”
“I have a solution,” she confirmed with a little nod, fingering the iridescent grey marbles in her skirt pocket.
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Jalen gasped for air as he ripped out of the memory, his bedroom tilting as he stumbled out of the chair. He could feel his pores widen as sweat sprung to his skin, the vertigo not settling like it normally did.
I just need to lay down, he thought to himself, blinking rapidly as he turned for his bed. But his vision was narrowing, the realization he wasn’t going to make it sinking in about the same time his knees hit the hardwood floor.